


Shorts

by bomberqueen17



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff and Crack, Teen Angst, aiden in a crop top, body image issues, modern a/u, raising daughters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:00:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28297152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Geralt comes home to find an inexplicable situation (because they're laughing too hard to explain) featuring his teenaged daughter, his brother's weird boyfriend, and some very small shorts.
Relationships: Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher), Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Comments: 73
Kudos: 205
Collections: Genuary 2021





	Shorts

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: negative body self-image, a few moments where Geralt has some worries that might come across as homophobic, but just know that there is nothing inappropriate and it all works out.

Geralt followed the sound of Ciri’s laughter through the house and out the back door. It was so good to hear her laugh and he hadn’t realized how long it had been since he’d heard her laugh like this, but she was absolutely given over to it, laughing in uncontrollable fits with her whole voice, almost crying with it. He found himself grinning before he even saw her, just at the unrestrained joy in it; she’d laughed like this as a little girl, in transports of joy over simple things, and it had changed this household so much.

He heard Aiden laughing too; the man could fool you that he was some kind of dignified person for small stretches of time but when he was really laughing he had this kind of honking noise that he made, which come to think of it, Geralt had heard only rarely. 

Ciri was shriek-crying with laughter and Aiden was honking as Geralt pushed through the back door, and he saw Ciri first. She was dressed oddly, in an enormous hooded sweatshirt that might have been Geralt’s, and a floor-length skirt, and she was collapsed in one of the deck chairs and absolutely howling, tears streaming down her face. 

“What’s so,” Geralt began, and then he stepped out onto the porch and saw Aiden, who was collapsed in laughter against the deck railing.

Aiden was wearing sneakers and mid-calf athletic socks, and then there was an unreasonable expanse of bare leg, pasty-white from lack of sun with an uneven kind of halo of blond hair standing out all around, and he was poured into the tiniest shorts Geralt had ever seen on an adult man, and then there was an expanse of pasty-white torso, and then stretched across his ribcage and nearly bursting under the strain of his shoulders was a shirt Geralt vaguely recognized as Ciri’s. It was pink and had sequins emblazoned across the front and said, in script, _Cutie_. 

“Ah shit,” Aiden said, and then collapsed into paroxysms of helpless laughter. 

“Hi Dad,” Ciri attempted, but it came out in a strangled shriek as she broke into laughter as well. 

“What the fuck,” Geralt said, staring in bafflement. 

He recognized those shorts. Those were Ciri’s gym shorts. He’d meant to buy her replacements, she was on the verge of outgrowing them, but he’d intended to ask her if she wanted anything different, and maybe make her put a measuring tape around herself just to make sure of the size because she’d been growing so fast, and then he’d forgotten about it. 

Aiden managed to push his lanky frame upright, and adopted a cartoony action pose, looking like a kind of hieroglyphic of a running figure. “Look,” he said, “they fit _great_ ,” and lost it in helpless squeaks. He wound up collapsed on his hands and knees, racked with actual spasms of laughter. 

Ciri was sobbing with laughter now, and Geralt-- well, to his jaded eye Aiden looked like some sort of pervert, wearing a little girl’s clothes, but actually he was pretty well-covered in crucial areas and it was obvious that whatever he was doing, he was doing it with Ciri’s enthusiastic participation. He was-- he was just-- wearing Ciri’s gym outfit, for some unguessable reason. 

“You’re wearing my daughter’s gym shorts,” Geralt pointed out. 

Aiden rolled onto his back, squeaking for breath, tears streaming down his face. “Mine now,” he managed to get out, and Ciri just _wailed_ in laughter. 

“Okay but _why_ ,” Geralt said. 

He wasn’t going to get an answer, he realized. Aiden was trying to talk but couldn’t get his breathing under control. Ciri was possibly in actual respiratory distress. He had to content himself with the fact that his brother’s boyfriend had never been a creep until now and wasn’t likely to have suddenly become one. 

Also, on reflection, as the man rolled around trying to breathe, there really wasn’t any of the expected… movement Geralt would have anticipated under shorts that brief. Aiden was pretty clearly wearing some serious underpinnings there, to make those shorts not in any way revealing. Given the man’s otherwise fairly annoying lack of modesty that meant Geralt knew more about his anatomy than he’d any interest in knowing, that actually showed some serious intention and foresight on his part. 

It was just… hard, sometimes, to be a dad in the modern era and read all these horrible news stories and such and not occasionally get paranoid that raising a daughter in these particularly vulnerable years in a house full of feral man-children, and Geralt had to admit to classifying himself among them, wasn’t courting some sort of disaster. But this clearly wasn’t that.

What the fuck it _was_ , however, was going to have to wait until Aiden got his diaphragm to behave.

Geralt finally went over and put his foot on Aiden’s solar plexus. “If your heart stops,” he said, “I can do chest compressions like this.”

Normally, Aiden was the kind of person who would suddenly go full Wrestlemania at the slightest provocation, so Geralt was more or less prepared for Aiden to swing his improbable limbs up and tackle him down into a scrum, but as it was all Aiden did was sort of twitch helplessly, tears streaming. 

“Oh ow I’m dying,” Ciri gasped, flopping around in the chair like a grounded fish. “Oh no. Oh gosh. Oh wow.”

“I’m, I’m,” Aiden attempted. “I’m gonna-- I’m gonna go to gym class. I’m ready. I’m ready for gym class.”

The back door of the house opened and Lambert came out, looking cautiously amused. “Hey is Aiden out here?” he said. “And what’s so funny, kiddo?” 

Ciri shrieked with laughter, the noise alarmingly like a wounded animal, and Geralt watched Lambert’s face go through an incredible journey as he took the last step out the door and got to an angle where he could see that Geralt was standing with his foot in the middle of Aiden’s chest, and that Aiden was wearing a middle school girl’s gym outfit. 

“What the fuck,” Lambert said. 

Aiden let out a noise like if a parakeet fucked a teakettle; his face had gone an alarmingly purple shade and his eyes were just streaming. Geralt took most of his weight off the foot on Aiden’s chest, concerned the man was going to actually die. 

“This is Ciri’s gym outfit,” Geralt said, since it was the only context he could offer.

Lambert stared at him. “Did you-- _put_ him in this?” he asked, sounding incredulously strangled. 

“How?” Geralt demanded. “ _How_ would I put him into my daughter’s gym costume?”

“I don’t know!” Lambert said.

“And _why_ ,” Geralt said, and he couldn’t get it out either but he started laughing, too. “Why would I do this. Why, and how, and what, Lambert, _what_ is _happening_.”

“I don’t _know_!” Lambert said.

Geralt was laughing now, he couldn’t help it. He took his foot off Aiden’s chest so he wouldn’t crush him, and staggered back a step as he started to lose control of his knees, and after a moment he was on his knees on the deck next to Aiden, who had slid off into conniptions of laughter; by this point Aiden was in the fetal position and weakly pounding one fist against the wooden decking. 

“What the fuck is happening,” Lambert said, over the din of Ciri’s shrieks and Aiden’s desperate wheezing and Geralt’s helpless guffaws. 

In a moment the door opened again, and Geralt managed to look up to see Vesemir standing there. 

“I don’t know what the fuck is happening,” Lambert said, gesturing wildly at them.

Ciri had slid out of the chair and was crumpled on the deck, bleating intermittently. Vesemir looked at Lambert, then looked at each of the three laughing people in turn, apparently unmoved. 

“I don’t think I want to know,” he said, and turned around and went back inside.

Lambert watched him go, then turned back to them. “Geralt,” he tried.

“How the fuck should I know?” Geralt demanded, gesturing wildly. “How the absolute fuck should I know?”

It took another five minutes of incoherence before Lambert came over and with unexpectedly practiced ease, flipped Aiden’s excessive expanse of limbs into a neat ball and hoisted him in a fireman’s carry back into the house. This took Geralt and Ciri several minutes of renewed laughter to recover from, but eventually they scraped themselves up off the deck and went inside as well.

Lambert had Aiden tied to the kitchen chair, using the broken ratchet strap Geralt had brought inside to salvage the fittings off of, and Aiden was hiccuping and wheezing but had nearly calmed down. Eskel was in the stairwell, looking haunted. 

“I don’t want to know,” he said, and vanished upstairs. 

“I’m fine,” Aiden said, “it’s cool, it’s cool. You can untie me. I’m totally fine now.” His breath hitched as he tried to breathe in, and he caught Ciri’s eyes and dissolved again, and so did she.

“Ciri,” Geralt said, scraping her up off the floor, “go to your room.”

She was laughing too hard to protest. Taking a page from Lambert’s book, Geralt carried her upstairs like a sack of potatoes, tossed her gently onto her bed, and shut the door before returning to the kitchen.

“I really, I really am fine,” Aiden said, “you can--”

“Not a chance,” Lambert said flatly. “You tell me what the fuck is going on.”

Aiden took a deep breath, held it, and let it out in a sigh, and then looked over at Geralt. “She’s in her room?”

Geralt nodded solemnly, working like hell to keep his face straight so he didn’t start laughing again.

“This right here is some Jaskier shit,” Lambert said, “and I need an explanation.”

“Oh,” Aiden said, with an air of realization. “Oh, I suppose this is the sort of thing he’d get up to.”

Resignedly, Geralt rolled his eyes, but nodded. “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t be so startled by it.” 

“His ass is bigger than mine though,” Aiden said. “He could never fit in these shorts.” He slid off into giggles again, but managed to get himself under control. “Hoo. Ahh. Okay. Boy.”

“Honestly I’m mostly astonished at your bladder control,” Geralt said. 

Aiden giggled, and then bit it off. “Listen I am wearing _so much_ underwear,” he said. “I tried the shorts on first to see if they’d go and I realized right away this wasn’t going to be innocent-funny if I didn’t-- well anyway I’m wearing a lot of underwear.”

“I do appreciate that,” Geralt said. “I would like to know why the outfit, though.”

Aiden took another deep breath and let it out in almost a whimper. “Hoo. Hoo boy. Okay. Well. So!”

“Go on,” Lambert said, unimpressed. Probably, Geralt thought, his hostility was largely that he was feeling excluded. Lambert had a terrible habit of assuming all jokes he didn’t understand were at his expense, and it was hard to get mad at him for it if you just thought a minute about why it was that way. He could do some work on himself, but he’d done a lot of work on himself and Geralt reminded himself that patience was really the only way to reap the benefits of the Lambert. 

Aiden cleared his throat. “She’s out of earshot, yeah?” He glanced at Geralt, who nodded again, frowning; why was that so important?

Aiden slumped over a bit, the tiedown strap keeping him from moving much. “Her fucking gym teacher,” he said. “Ciri came home crying from school and it took me a while but I got her calmed down enough to explain and she said the gym teacher yelled at her that her shorts were too short and made a big deal out of making her go change and do gym class in her jeans and half her friends have the same exact shorts and none of them got yelled at and she knows it’s because, and these are her words, she’s got _fat thighs_ , and she was really upset about it and I tried a bunch of stuff to calm her down and she stormed off to her room so I took the clothes out of her bag and decided I was gonna do this.”

They stood in silence looking at him for a moment, and Geralt’s vision went a little red around he edges. “The gym teacher,” Geralt managed to say finally.

“Yeah,” Aiden said, and he was audibly mad now, under the fiercely cheerful aspect of his tone. “So I’m going in on Wednesday and I’m gonna take gym class with her in this outfit and see if the teacher thinks _my_ thighs are too fat.”

Geralt considered that for a long moment. With great reluctance he said, “Aiden, I don’t think I can let you do that.”

“No,” Lambert said, “because I’m going, with a fucking baseball bat.”

“ _No_ ,” Geralt and Aiden said, in surprisingly unison intensity.

“No, you’re not getting arrested again,” Geralt said. He sighed, and scrubbed his hands over his face, then raised his voice. “Eskel!”

“No,” Eskel said distantly. 

“Come here,” Geralt said. 

“It’s fine,” Aiden said, relentlessly cheerful, “I can handle this nonviolently.”

“No,” Geralt said heavily. “I’m going to have to handle this nonviolently.”

* * *

What actually happened is that Eskel told Geralt to call Yennefer, and Geralt did, and Yennefer demanded a photo of Aiden in the outfit as payment for solving the problem, so Ciri came down from her room and did a photo shoot with Aiden, who was remarkably willing to have photographic evidence of his sartorial choices. 

“Don’t you have,” Geralt said, finally, but couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence.

“Shame?” Aiden said. “No. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s just my body. A body is a body.” 

“Hm,” Geralt said. 

“Also,” Aiden said, “these underpants are so tight I can’t feel my legs and it’s impeding my judgement in general.”

“Well,” Geralt said, “good for you.”

* * *

Geralt sat with Ciri and ordered her new gym shorts, after a quick text consultation with the mom of one of her classmates who’d been helpful on things like that before. The classmate’s mother was supportive and confirmed which type of shorts were in style. 

Geralt never did find out what Yennefer said to the gym teacher. 

* * *

Aiden kept the shorts and the shirt. He actually wore the shirt one day, for a water balloon fight in the backyard.

If he wore the shorts again, he did so privately and it was none of Geralt’s gods-damned business.

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of potentially part of a series but as I have finished no other works in the series, it's just a generic modern A/U for the moment.
> 
> Yes I'm aware there'd be more readership for this if it were Jaskier in the booty shorts but the dynamic was Geralt not knowing him all that well, and also Joey Batey's not-that-twinky-actually ass would not fit in Freya Allen's shorts no matter what, and also-- also-- also!!! if this does wind up a series then there's going to be an inevitable sequel wherein Jaskier is _furious_ that _he_ is not Tiny Shorts Guy and shenanigans will ensue.  
> also like. the muse. she is fickle. especially when I'm so fucking sad. I'm so fucking sad you guys. Sorry.
> 
> (update: heh I wrote this in a sort of fugue state of grief after my dad died suddenly and I was waiting to hear from my mom about whether I should go home. I am feeling more even-keeled now so please enjoy this story and do not worry about me, I love you all and life is going on. What can we do but laugh!)


End file.
